Skewering Pat Robertson and The 700 Club, Past and Present Jeremy Parker, Blogmaster
Why is this blog featuring years-old clips from the 1990s? Read the introductory page. Not at all affiliated with Marion G. ("Pat") Robertson, The 700 Club, or the Christian Broadcasting Network.
Just yesterday morning I wrote how Pat Robertson forgot that he himself performed the exorcism he said he had "heard about" someone else performing. Then I dismissed the possibility of Alzheimer's Disease because you'd imagine that sort of occasional mind-wipe would be obvious on live-to-tape television.*
But after yesterday's broadcast, I'm not so sure. Okay, it might not be Alzheimer's, but clearly there's something not right with Pat's brain—I mean beyond the usual things not right with his brain (like his worldview and his ideology and his extremism)—because Pat was losing focus more often than a non-union film projectionist.
Here's the rundown:
Did Someone Use a Satellite to Take Control of the Missing Malaysian Airliner Like a Bond Villain? Eh, Let's Talk About Something Else.
The Republicans Won a Special-Election That Was a Referendum on Obamacare! Oh Wait, No It Wasn't.
And Now for No Immediate Reason, Here's Some Chocolate
Yea, Christian Movies! Awww, I Miss Mel Gibson, Can't We Get Him Back?
People Just Don't Want to Believe Because Evolution and the Scientific Method
On Tuesday, I posted a blow-by-blow account of all the wingnut asshattery in that day's 700 Club. Turns out I probably could have done the same with Monday's broadcast had I not slept in—hey, it was a holiday!—because there was a load of stuff being shoveled that day, too. You probably heard about a couple of the juicier items:
Because this winter has been a little harsh (climate change means severer weather at all of the extremes), Pat Robertson went on a semi-focused rant about global warming that touched on "Obama's third term" (???), John Kerry, SUVs on Mars (not Jupiter this time)—ultimately landing on a kinda comprehensible although still lunatic argument that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by socialists who are making up "climate change" so they can take control of the energy industry (just like Obama wants to take over the healthcare industry!). If you're keeping score, "socialist hoax" is now at least Pat's fourth attempt at discrediting global warming, after "it's actually global cooling," "it's a scam by money-hungry scientists," and "it's a myth by occultist environmentalists who worship the Earth." (Curiously, he's completely forgotten the time when he filmed a commercial for Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection in 2008.)
Also during the "Bring It On" segment (this part of the program is so frequently a source of our ire/entertainment, because it catches Pat at his unscripted best), a viewer asked if he should tell his wife about an old girlfriend who revealed to him that she was a transsexual, and Pat's initial response was "Keep your mouth shut." Actually, if you look at the full transcript of Pat's reply, it seems like he's only saying, "There's no reason to complicate your marriage by talking about whatever potentially awkward relationships you had before you met your wife," which perhaps isn't such an unreasonable outlook. However, the rest of the Internet wants to believe he said it like, "Don't ever, ever talk about your shameful, sinful deed," so I'll play along.
But let me not bury my lede any further. In the middle of his latest global-warming conniption, and lost in the shuffle of all the coverage given it, Pat brought up this seemingly irrelevant news story—the National Science Foundation conducted a survey finding that a quarter of Americans didn't know the Earth revolves around the Sun.
“One-third of the American people do not realize that the Earth revolves around the Sun. They think the Sun revolves around the Earth, 'cause they see the Sun come up in the morning and go down at night… It's kind of like the Middle Ages. You got excommunicated if you suggested that the Earth was round, and you suggested that the Earth revolves around the Sun. That was heresy.” [Pat later corrected the part where it was actually one-quarter of respondents.]
There was so much Pat Robertson crazy on today's broadcast of The 700 Club, I don't even know where to begin. At the start of the show, I guess.
1. The opening news story: the United Nations Human Rights Council is considering referring Kim Jong-un and other North Korean officials to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. Robertson follows up the story:
“Why do we have this? Keep in mind the policy decisions of the United States have enormous consequences and they last for decades. We had the opportunity—and I was in the Marine Corps in Korea, I know whereof I speak—we had the opportunity in that peninsula to close it off and win a military victory. General MacArthur was going on the way to the Yalu River, he was going to set up a defense line across that boundary, and then he was going to mop up what was there, and we would have installed a democratic government in Korea. Instead of that, the politicians were scared of what the Russians might think or the Chinese might think, and they took MacArthur home in seeming disgrace, he was cashiered by Truman.
“And we made a line on the 38th Parallel, and we allowed Kim's grandfather…to set up a dictatorship, and have had that country on the watch list. Now they have developed nuclear weapons, who knows if they have chemical weapons, and they have tormented their people. And at the same time we send delegations over there to make peace with them—there's no peace with a group like that. They should be arrested and executed…”
In actuality, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was relieved of his command after his efforts to push the war up to the Yalu River resulted in China's joining the war on the North Korean side and flooding the Korean peninsula with 180,000 troops—despite having assured President Truman that China would not do so, and severely underestimating how many Chinese troops could cross the Yalu into North Korea if they did. The unexpected Chinese offensive severely drove back United Nations forces; for two months, Seoul was under North Korean control. Pat Robertson's "scared politicians"were the Truman Administration with their order to establish a cease-fire, an order which MacArthur directly contravened—a clear act of insubordination warranting his removal.
At least that's what the history books say. But Pat knows whereof he speaks, as he was in Korea—in the rear echelon, to be exact, where his father, a U.S. Senator, secured him a cushy position as a "liquor officer" responsible for maintaining the soldiers' supplies of alcohol. (Actually, Pat's father wanted him kept in Japan and out of Korea entirely.) Pat calls himself a combat Marine, but he never saw combat or came anywhere near it.
2. A former Planned Parenthood nurse (who admits she wasn't really pro-choice to begin with) is calling the organization "a money-grubbing, evil" place because some staffers liked to chant "Abortion all the time!" (Also, receptionists got yelled at if they let the phone ring more than three times. Evil!) Well, Pat Robertson needs only the barest of excuses to go off on Planned Parenthood, and here it is:
Today's broadcast of The 700 Club featured a segment by Pat Robertson's own CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) News on "global cooling," an extreme-minority belief (of course) that not only is global warming false, but that the Earth is actually getting colder. I'm not going to pretend to have the scientific bona fides to thoroughly debunk this theory, so I'll just direct you to desmogblog.com and their collection of articles on global cooling instead.
But it wasn't enough for Robertson's band of merry right-wing Christian journalists reporters to flog the latest line of b.s. from the anti-warming crowd. CBN actually took a right-wing slur against a climate-change scientist, flipped it, and claimed it was global-warming proponents making the accusation.
“Climate-change skeptics have been…compared to Holocaust deniers, and even child molesters.”
I've heard the first charge before, and yes, a couple of newspaper columnists made that comparison to drive home the point that the anti-warming crowd is denying the truth in the face of clear and overwhelming evidence. (Let me say that as a Jew, I take no offense at this comparison.)
But child molester? Apparently, someone said that too, about Professor Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University:
”Mann could be said to be theJerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.”
EXCEPT: Michael Mann is a global-warming advocate. The child-molester comparison was not made against a climate-change skeptic, but BY a climate-change skeptic—Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think-tank that refutes global warming. The ultraconservative National Review liked the child-molester comparison so much that they devoted an article to it on their blog. (Simberg has since wiped the quote cited above from the post on CEI's blog, but the National Review article retains the citation. Dr. Mann is currently suing both CEI and National Review for defamation.)
Did CBN deliberately flip the attack on a global-warming advocate into persecution against climate-change deniers, or just misread it? Who knows. Maybe a CBN reporter saw someone say something beyond the pale—and assumed it had to come from the left. They're the ones who make such comments. Not us on the right! We don't say such things! WE'RE THE ONES WHO ARE PERSECUTED.
Or maybe they just lied in the hopes that no one would notice. (There's not much critical analysis of CBN, Pat Robertson, and The 700 Club that doesn't originate from Right Wing Watch or this blog no one's reading yet.)
I did also like the part of the "global cooling" story that suggested the Earth was in fact warming up through 1998, implying that global warming used to be valid. Which was the position CBN took back then, right? Of course not:
(Note that the person interviewed in that segment right after "science seems to indicate otherwise" is Fred L. Smith, another Competitive Enterprise Institute figure—the founder, in fact—who holds degrees in theoretical mathematics and political science. Curious how they couldn't find, you know, an actual climate scientist to make those points.)
Finally, I like how CBN still calls them "climate-change skeptics" even though they believe the Earth is getting colder now. Keeping that terminology just proves that they're grabbing hold of any anti-warming theory that comes down the pike.
Hey, remember that Saturday Night Live sketch where Tina Fey and Amy Poehler played Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, and Fey/Palin said that global warming is "just God hugging us closer"? Ha! Parody. We laugh because it's not real! What's that, Pat Robertson?
“Put God's laws to work for you!…If I can get a jet airplane up into the jet stream going from west to east, the law of God works for me, and I start going about 100 miles an hour faster. I was in a plane coming back from someplace on the West Coast…it was real slow going out, but coming back, we got in the jet stream, and it was about 100 miles an hour of extra speed! Because God's law was carrying us along!”
God pushes you faster when you fly from the west to the east, but he's a real sonofabitch if you fly in the other direction. Maybe he's afraid we'll find out that if you fly east-to-west fast enough, you can in fact stop the earth's rotation, reverse it, and turn back time. But how else could we save Lois Lane from the earthquake? She has to live! If only for the sequels!
